Left: Untitled photograph from the Apollo 11 mission. July 1969. Chromogenic color print. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Susan and Peter MacGill; right: Untitled photograph from the Apollo 11 mission. July 1969. Chromogenic color print. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Susan and Peter MacGill

The Apollo space program, which conducted 12 manned missions between 1961 and 1975, was the first to bring humans to the moon, and has become a cultural touchstone. The most famous mission, of course, is Apollo 11, when Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first humans to walk on the surface of the moon.

For a number of years MoMA’s Department of Photography has sought to collect works by the American photographer Andres Serrano (b. 1950), and an exciting acquisition finally came to fruition through the generosity of Stephen and Sandra Abramson, who gifted to the Museum two Serrano works, Piss (1987) and Blood (1987).

In mid-January, two of MoMA’s six curatorial departments—Painting and Sculpture, and Drawings and Prints—held acquisitions meetings to usher into the Museum’s collection new artist’s books, posters, fabric installations, painted sculptures, and more. These meetings take place quarterly and, over the course of the year, result in the addition of hundreds of works—spanning mediums, geographies, and histories—to create an overall collection that is continuously evolving.

Before moving to New York in 1959, choreographer Simone Forti spent four heady, formative years in San Francisco. There, she trained with the postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin, who rejected the stylistic constraints of ballet and modern dance. On Halprin’s outdoor dance deck in wooded Marin County, Forti explored improvisation, her motions guided by a keen alertness to the body’s anatomy. She also organized open-work sessions with her then husband, the Minimalist artist Robert Morris, gathering artists for communal, multidisciplinary explorations of movement, objects, sound, and light.

From an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing in 1929, MoMA’s collection has bloomed to nearly 200,000 works across six curatorial departments—Painting and Sculpture, Drawings and Prints, Media and Performance Art, Photography, Film, and Architecture and Design—including everything from Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) to Maya Deren’s lush film Meshes of the Afternoon

At the entrance to the current exhibition Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture is Frederick Kiesler’s Endless House (1947–60). He envisioned this eclectic, flexible habitat as “a living organism, not just an arrangement of dead material.” He saw the house as a composition of spaces “as elastic as the vital functions.” A selection of drawings features his exhaustive investigation of forms for it, drawings which, through his lively use of ink and superimposition of multiple sketches on transparent overlays, approach animation.

Sound forms the nucleus of much of American artist Christian Marclay’s practice. From innovative sound collages, with turntables and records employed as instruments; to the splicing and reconstituting of physical records to create strange, jumping concoctions of melodies

“Drawing is a verb,” the artist Richard Serra once said. An important new acquisition for MoMA’s Department of Drawings, Serra’s Verb List (1967–68) serves as a kind of manifesto for this pronouncement.

We reinstall the permanent collection in the first five rooms of The Edward Steichen Photography galleries at least once a year, in order to continuously have on view a selection of outstanding works from the Museum’s collection. Each new display is organized differently, but all of them aim to suggest the vitality and richness of photography’s creative traditions.

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